Posted by Dr Andrew Connell
Well, I suppose one of the joys of electoral punditry is being proved comprehensively wrong. The other day I was confidently saying that, yes, of course if there was going to be a coalition it was likely to be Labour/ Lib Dem, the Lib Dems were closer to labour than to the Conservatives even after any Cameronite repositioning, they’d worked together in Scotland and Wales, and so on....Now (midday on Friday) Nick Clegg has said that the party with the most seats and voters should have the first go at forming a government and that, of course, points us towards some kind of Tory/Lib Dem agreement. It seems that David Cameron will be saying something on the subject at 2.30 this afternoon, so by the time you read this I may have been overtaken by events yet again...ho hum.
Interesting though to think about why this should be. Presumably it’s to do with setting up support, if not for electoral reform itself, at least for getting reform seriously onto the agenda. Although the Conservatives have been by far the most sceptical of the three main parties about reform, as I write, David Cameron has apparently not ruled it out, saying that he would consider whatever was necessary to form a strong government. We might ask what exactly this means; but we might also wonder whether the Conservatives would have gone even this far without the carrot of Lib Dem Parliamentary support being dangled in front of them. Events keep unfolding.
